Karzai Releases More Taliban Prisoners

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - President Hamid Karzai ordered the release Sunday of more former Taliban fighters, a highly symbolic move that could boost his standing and undermine holdouts from the ousted hardline Islamic regime.

Karzai issued a decree saying all Afghans detained at the northern Sheberghan prison and not considered dangerous should be set free immediately.

It was unclear how many inmates were affected. Local officials said the jail holds more than 400 suspected Afghan Taliban.

The government hopes the move, like the return of millions of Afghans from exile and the release last week of dozens of Pakistanis who fought with the Taliban, will help heal the wounds left by the latest episode in the country's almost quarter-century of conflict.

``They are Afghans. They have every right to a peaceful and respectable life in the new Afghanistan,'' presidential spokesman Jawid Luddin told The Associated Press. ``The time for making people suffer and jailing them without reason is over.''

Thousands of fighters captured when U.S. and allied Afghan forces pushed the Taliban out of power were disarmed and sent home to their villages. Many more were killed.

But hundreds remained in the jails of commanders from the Northern Alliance faction such as Abdul Rashid Dostum, the ethnic Uzbek warlord whose power base is Sheberghan.

Dostum's spokesman, Faizullah Zaki, said Sunday that Karzai's decree would be respected but declined to comment further.

Luddin said the release was unrelated to a request from Dostum for a top job at the Defense Ministry.

The prisoner release is the latest attempt by Karzai to ease tensions ahead of presidential elections to take place in June under a new post-Taliban constitution.

Karzai has said repeatedly that only a handful of Taliban leaders were to be regarded as terrorists, appealing to rank-and-file supporters to throw their energy into reconstructing the impoverished country.

The released prisoners could also bolster his standing in the former Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan, where anti-government insurgents have launched a string of deadly attacks since the constitution was passed, killing at least 45 people.

It was unclear when Pakistanis held at Sheberghan also might be freed. Luddin said they were a ``separate case'' whose fate would be decided later.

Forty-nine were released Thursday in a gesture of goodwill after the visit of Pakistani Prime Minister Zafarullah Khan Jamali. Jamali pledged to free Afghans in Pakistani jails.

Pakistan's deputy ambassador, Abdel Hamid Afridi, said then that more than 500 Pakistanis remain in Afghan prisons, most of them in Sheberghan.

Watched a program on the LINK channel about the alleged murder of close to 3000 taliban prisoners being transported in containers. When the story broke back in late 2001 it was spiked after about a week. This "documentary" by an Afghan reporter left a lot of questions about American involvement even though it was the Northern Alliance that did the transporting. If the massacre is true, most of these prisoners will either have learned their lesson or will try for revenge.

2 posted on 01/18/2004 2:42:19 PM PST by eastforker (The color of justice is green,just ask Johny Cochran!)

3 posted on 01/18/2004 7:59:49 PM PST by Flavius ("... we should reconnoitre assiduosly... " Vegetius)

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